Words Worth Noting - April 24, 2025

“Germany, which had been united as recently as 1871 and within one generation had become an awesome industrial and military power, was, on the eve of war [World War I], the foremost representative of innovation and renewal. She was, among nations, the very embodiment of vitalism and technical brilliance. The war for her was to be war of liberation, a Befreiungskrieg, from the hypocrisy of bourgeois form and convenience, and Britain was to her the principal representative of the order against which she was rebelling. Britain was in fact the major conservative power of the fin-de-siècle world.”

Author’s “Preface” in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era